In this celebrated, landmark history of the Balkans, Misha Glenny investigates the roots of the bloodshed, invasions and nationalist fervour that have come to define our understanding of the south-eastern edge of Europe. In doing so, he reveals that groups we think of as implacable enemies have, over the centuries, formed unlikely alliances, thereby disputing the idea that conflict in the Balkans is the ineluctable product of ancient grudges. And he exposes the often-catastrophic relationship between the Balkans and the rest of Europe, raising profound questions about recent Western intervention. Updated to cover the last decade's brutal conflicts in Kosovo and Macedonia, the surge of organised crime in the region, the rise of Turkey and the rocky road to EU membership, The Balkans remains the essential and peerless study of Europe's most complex and least understood region.

The fifth instalment in the teen dance drama franchise directed by Trish Sie and starring Alyson Stoner and Ryan Guzman. The film follows multiple crews from the previous four films as they battle it out in Las Vegas for the chance of securing their own show in the entertainment capital of the world. The supporting cast includes Briana Evigan, Izabella Miko and Adam G. Sevani.

Asta is invited to a memorial. It's been ten years since her university friend August died. The invitation disrupts everything - the novel she is working on and friendship with Mai and her two-year-old son - reanimating longings, doubts, and the ghosts of parties past. Soon a new story begins to take shape. Not of the obscure Polish sculptor Asta wanted to write about, but of what really happened the night of August's death, and in the stolen, exuberant days leading up to it. The story she has never dared reveal to Mai. Moving between Asta's past and present, Memorial, 29 June is a novel about who we really are, and who we thought we would become. It's a novel about the intensity with which we experience the world in our twenties, and how our ambitions, anxieties, and memories from that time never relinquish their grasp on how we encounter our future. In prose that shimmers like poetry, masterfully translated by Misha Hoekstra, Memorial, 29 June is an urgent yet tender reminder that sometimes pain is where the love is, and that grief, however thorny, should never go unspoken.

Cultural Writing. German language text. Witty, charming, and full of philosophical verve, this book discloses the paradoxes and non-sequiturs informing Germans' love-hate relationship to America and Americans. Mit Witz, Charme und philosophischem Biss deckt Misha Waiman die Ungereimtheiten und Paradoxien der Hassliebe der Deutschen zu Amerika und den Amerikanern auf.

This special book is a compilation of essays on a remarkable but little-known story that lasted over half a century of world-renowned physicist, the late Sir Rudolf Peierls and his wife Genia Kannegiser. Peierls collected a lot of prestigious awards in his lifetime, and in the beginning of WW2, he and Otto Frisch were responsible for the inception of the Anglo-American nuclear program (1940). He was also one of the key contributors in the research at Los Alamos during those turbulent times.Most previous books on Peierls have focused on his scientific research, while the contents for this volume sheds light on his private life in dramatic circumstances. The extensive contributions were not only gathered from the relatives of Genia, the couple's daughters, Landau's students, and from Russian and English archives, but they also include the unique perspectives of the author who is a professional theoretical physicist and is also fluent in Russian, his native language.So, this fascinating story of love, friendship and physics between Rudolf and Genia is being told for the first time from a surprisingly new angle through correspondence between Genia and Rudolf, memoirs and other documents, interesting and informal excerpts from Peierls' private 'diary' covering the years 1979-1994 that will take the reader on a journey through communism, world war, the trials and tribulations of the loving couple with distinctly very different personalities.

This special book is a compilation of essays on a remarkable but little-known story that lasted over half a century of world-renowned physicist, the late Sir Rudolf Peierls and his wife Genia Kannegiser. Peierls collected a lot of prestigious awards in his lifetime, and in the beginning of WW2, he and Otto Frisch were responsible for the inception of the Anglo-American nuclear program (1940). He was also one of the key contributors in the research at Los Alamos during those turbulent times.Most previous books on Peierls have focused on his scientific research, while the contents for this volume sheds light on his private life in dramatic circumstances. The extensive contributions were not only gathered from the relatives of Genia, the couple's daughters, Landau's students, and from Russian and English archives, but they also include the unique perspectives of the author who is a professional theoretical physicist and is also fluent in Russian, his native language.So, this fascinating story of love, friendship and physics between Rudolf and Genia is being told for the first time from a surprisingly new angle through correspondence between Genia and Rudolf, memoirs and other documents, interesting and informal excerpts from Peierls' private 'diary' covering the years 1979-1994 that will take the reader on a journey through communism, world war, the trials and tribulations of the loving couple with distinctly very different personalities.

This book presents the first detailed biography of George Placzek - an outstanding physicist, a participant in the Manhattan Project who stood at the very inception of nuclear physics and the subsequent development of the nuclear bomb in the course of the WWII. In the 1930s, George Placzek was known as an adventurous person with a sharp sense of humor, a tireless generator of novel physics ideas which he generously shared with his colleagues. Born in Brno (now Czech Republic) into a wealthy Jewish family, he lost all his relatives to Holocaust, casting a tragic shadow on his life.Placzek's scientific career began in the late 1920s when the quantum revolution was almost over, but nuclear physics was still at its infancy. He established personal and scientific relations with the creators of quantum mechanics, such as Heisenberg in Leipzig and Niels Bohr in Copenhagen. In Rome, he worked with Fermi, and in Copenhagen he became a part of Bohr's nuclear physics team which dominated nuclear theory at that time. The scope of Placzek's pilgrimage around world physics centers in the 1930s was unique among his colleagues. In January 1939, George Placzek managed to emigrate from Europe to the US, and became a part of the British Mission within the Manhattan Project. His physical insights were instrumental in advancing from the basic discoveries on nuclear chain reactions to the Trinity experiment, Hiroshima and Nagasaki.This book is a unique compilation of a large number of previously unknown and unpublished documents from private and university archives, police reports, etc. Placzek's correspondence with the leadership of the Hebrew University in 1934, the 1937 NKVD interrogation files of Konrad Weisselberg, recollections of Ella Andriesse as well as the Zurich Police report of 1956 detailing the circumstances of Placzek's death in a Zurich hotel are illuminating as they shed light on poorly known pages of his life.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER! From Misha Collins, actor, longtime poet, and activist, whose massive online following calls itself his "Army For Good," comes his debut poetry collection, Some Things I Still Can't Tell You. Trademark wit and subtle vulnerability converge in each poem; this book is both a celebration of and aspiration for a life well lived. #1 PUBLISHERS WEEKLY BESTSELLER! USA TODAY Bestseller! This book is a compilation of small observations and musings. It's filled with moments of reflection and a love letter to simple joys: passing a simple blade of grass on the sidewalk, the freedom of peeing outdoors late at night, or the way a hand-built ceramic mug feels when it's full of warm tea on a chilly morning. It's a catalog and a compendium that examines the complicated experience of being all too human and interacting with a complex, confounding, breathtaking world ... and a reminder to stop and be awake and alive in yourself.

Recently discovered ancient silk and bamboo manuscripts have transformed our understanding of classical Chinese thought. In this book, Wang Zhongjiang closely examines these texts and, by parsing the complex divergence between ancient and modern Chinese records, reveals early Chinese philosophy to be much richer and more complex than we ever imagined. As numerous and varied cosmologies sprang up in this cradle of civilization, beliefs in the predictable movements of nature merged with faith in gods and their divine punishments. Slowly, powerful spirits and gods were stripped of their potency as nature's constant order awakened people to the possibility of universal laws, and those laws finally gave birth to an ideally conceived community, objectively managed and rationally ordered.

This visionary and engaging book provides a mathematical perspective on the fundamental ideas of numbers, space, life, evolution, the brain and the mind. The author suggests how a development of mathematical concepts in the spirit of category theory may lead to unravelling the mystery of the human mind and the design of universal learning algorithms. The book is divided into two parts, the first of which describes the ideas of great mathematicians and scientists, those who saw sparks of light in the dark sea of unknown. The second part, Memorandum Ergo, reflects on how mathematics can contribute to the understanding of the mystery of thought. It argues that the core of the human mind is a structurally elaborated object that needs a creation of a broad mathematical context for its understanding. Readers will discover the main properties of the expected mathematical objects within this context, called ERGO-SYSTEMS, and readers will see how these "systems" may serve as prototypes for design of universal learning computer programs. This is a work of great, poetical insight and is richly illustrated. It is a highly attractive read for all those who welcome a mathematical and scientific way of thinking about the world.

Studying and using light or "photons" to image and then to control and transmit molecular information is among the most challenging and significant research fields to emerge in recent years. One of the fastest growing areas involves research in the temporal imaging of quantum phenomena, ranging from molecular dynamics in the femto (10-15s) time regime for atomic motion to the atto (10-18s) time scale of electron motion. In fact, the attosecond "revolution" is now recognized as one of the most important recent breakthroughs and innovations in the science of the 21st century. A major participant in the development of ultrafast femto and attosecond temporal imaging of molecular quantum phenomena has been theory and numerical simulation of the nonlinear, non-perturbative response of atoms and molecules to ultrashort laser pulses. Therefore, imaging quantum dynamics is a new frontier of science requiring advanced mathematical approaches for analyzing and solving spatial and temporal multidimensional partial differential equations such as Time-Dependent Schroedinger Equations (TDSE) andTime-Dependent Dirac equations (TDDEs for relativistic phenomena). These equations are also coupled to the photons in Maxwell's equations for collective propagation effects. Inversion of the experimental imaging data of quantum dynamics presents new mathematical challenges in the imaging of quantum wave coherences on subatomic (subnanometer) spatial dimensions and multiple timescales from atto to femto and even nanoseconds.In "Quantum Dynamic Imaging: Theoretical and Numerical Methods," leading researchers discuss these exciting state-of-the-art developments and theirimplications for R&D in view of the promise of quantum dynamic imagingscience as the essential tool for controlling matter at the molecular level."

Pattern Formation in Morphogenesis is a rich source of interesting and challenging mathematical problems. The volume aims at showing how a combination of new discoveries in developmental biology and associated modelling and computational techniques has stimulated or may stimulate relevant advances in the field. Finally it aims at facilitating the process of unfolding a mutual recognition between Biologists and Mathematicians of their complementary skills, to the point where the resulting synergy generates new and novel discoveries. It offers an interdisciplinary interaction space between biologists from embryology, genetics and molecular biology who present their own work in the perspective of the advancement of their specific fields, and mathematicians who propose solutions based on the knowledge grasped from biologists.

Agape's Performance shows God's unconditional love for the life and destiny of each reader. In Agape's Performance, Agape teaches Destiny His ways of wisdom and love. Let your own destiny follow and learn the ways of Agape as He shows what one must do to enjoy life and have many happy days. Show Agape your love by living for Him and following His unique path for you called, the best way of all, the way of love. Beautifully and uniquely illustrated in colored pencil media, Agape's Performance flower collection speaks of living the love life freely given by Agape, the most strongest force in the universe. Agape's Performance is a wonderful treasure book that presents an expressive collection of Scriptures intended for all of God's children, both young and old from all walks of life. "Live for Me and I will show you" says Agape. In Agape's Performance, Agape plainly speaks on the path of life as uniquely portrayed in the NCV translation of The Holy Scriptures.

Different Faces of Geometry - edited by the world renowned geometers S. Donaldson, Ya. Eliashberg, and M. Gromov - presents the current state, new results, original ideas and open questions from the following important topics in modern geometry:

Amoebas and Tropical Geometry
Convex Geometry and Asymptotic Geometric Analysis
Differential Topology of 4-Manifolds
3-Dimensional Contact Geometry
Floer Homology and Low-Dimensional Topology
Kahler Geometry
Lagrangian and Special Lagrangian Submanifolds
Refined Seiberg-Witten Invariants.

These apparently diverse topics have a common feature in that they are all areas of exciting current activity. The Editors have attracted an impressive array of leading specialists to author chapters for this volume: G. Mikhalkin (USA-Canada-Russia), V.D. Milman (Israel) and A.A. Giannopoulos (Greece), C. LeBrun (USA), Ko Honda (USA), P. Ozsvath (USA) and Z. Szabo (USA), C. Simpson (France), D. Joyce (UK) and P. Seidel (USA), and S. Bauer (Germany).

"One can distinguish various themes running through the different contributions. There is some emphasis on invariants defined by elliptic equations and their applications in low-dimensional topology, symplectic and contact geometry (Bauer, Seidel, Ozsvath and Szabo). These ideas enter, more tangentially, in the articles of Joyce, Honda and LeBrun. Here and elsewhere, as well as explaining the rapid advances that have been made, the articles convey a wonderful sense of the vast areas lying beyond our current understanding.
Simpson's article emphasizes the need for interesting new constructions (in that case of Kahler and algebraic manifolds), a point which is also made by Bauer in the context of 4-manifolds and the "11/8 conjecture."
LeBrun's article gives another perspective on 4-manifold theory, via Riemannian geometry, and the challenging open questions involving the geometry of even "well-known" 4-manifolds.
There are also striking contrasts between the articles. The authors have taken different approaches: for example, the thoughtful essay of Simpson, the new research results of LeBrun and the thorough expositions with homework problems of Honda.
One can also ponder the differences in the style of mathematics. In the articles of Honda, Giannopoulos and Milman, and Mikhalkin, the "geometry" is present in a very vivid and tangible way; combining respectively with topology, analysis and algebra. The papers of Bauer and Seidel, on the other hand, makes the point that algebraic and algebro-topological abstraction (triangulated categories, spectra) can play an important role in very unexpected ways in concrete geometric problems." - From the Preface by the Editors "

Advances in sensing, signal processing, and computer technology during the past half century have stimulated numerous attempts to design general-purpose ma chines that see. These attempts have met with at best modest success and more typically outright failure. The difficulties encountered in building working com puter vision systems based on state-of-the-art techniques came as a surprise. Perhaps the most frustrating aspect of the problem is that machine vision sys tems cannot deal with numerous visual tasks that humans perform rapidly and effortlessly. In reaction to this perceived discrepancy in performance, various researchers (notably Marr, 1982) suggested that the design of machine-vision systems should be based on principles drawn from the study of biological systems. This "neuro morphic" or "anthropomorphic" approach has proven fruitful: the use of pyramid (multiresolution) image representation methods in image compression is one ex ample of a successful application based on principles primarily derived from the study of biological vision systems. It is still the case, however, that the perfor of computer vision systems falls far short of that of the natural systems mance they are intended to mimic, suggesting that it is time to look even more closely at the remaining differences between artificial and biological vision systems."

The classical theory of partial differential equations is rooted in physics, where equations (are assumed to) describe the laws of nature. Law abiding functions, which satisfy such an equation, are very rare in the space of all admissible functions (regardless of a particular topology in a function space). Moreover, some additional (like initial or boundary) conditions often insure the uniqueness of solutions. The existence of these is usually established with some apriori estimates which locate a possible solution in a given function space. We deal in this book with a completely different class of partial differential equations (and more general relations) which arise in differential geometry rather than in physics. Our equations are, for the most part, undetermined (or, at least, behave like those) and their solutions are rather dense in spaces of functions. We solve and classify solutions of these equations by means of direct (and not so direct) geometric constructions. Our exposition is elementary and the proofs of the basic results are selfcontained. However, there is a number of examples and exercises (of variable difficulty), where the treatment of a particular equation requires a certain knowledge of pertinent facts in the surrounding field. The techniques we employ, though quite general, do not cover all geometrically interesting equations. The border of the unexplored territory is marked by a number of open questions throughout the book.